Odd issues, not sure if malware

Hi,

So recently I’ve noticed a few odd issues popping up and I’m not sure if they might be indicative of any kind of malware problem. I’ll start by saying I’ve run a full Avast scan as well as a full Malwarebytes scan and neither program has found any issues. I’m running the newest Chrome and Avast on Win7 64 Bit.

  1. I get multiple green circles with the white ticks on search results from Avast online security, as few as a couple, as many as 5 or eight. Also on the grey no rating symbols too.

  2. When I boot up, it takes a couple of minutes before skype starts, and during that time my icons flash white and then fill themselves back in. Trying to open chrome during this time causes the chrome window to turn black.

  3. Starting today, opening a new tab in chrome causes chrome://newtab to be displayed unless I refresh the new tab, at which point the regular new tab is shown.

I’m experiencing no crashing, no slowdowns in performance and everything else generally seems to be fine. I experienced increased cpu usage one time but attributed it to a program auto updating. No odd HDD usage, or internet activity. My concern comes from these three points and also that zonealarm has, in the past couple of days, blocked a few port scans from weird ip addresses.

I’ve tried updating everything, clearing browser history, the aforementioned scans by malwarebytes and avast and so far the issues remain. My questions would be what, if anything, should I do? Are there additional scans I can or should run? Or am I overthinking everything?

Thank you in advance.

1) I get multiple green circles with the white ticks on search results from Avast online security, as few as a couple, as many as 5 or eight. Also on the grey no rating symbols too.
https://forum.avast.com/index.php?topic=198943.0
  1. Skype has been a performance crusher for as long as I’ve used it - It’s honestly crashed more times than I can count just because of how poorly optimized it can be. Mind you that these crashes are on both old and new systems, and with 8GB of RAM each. So it’s not like my hardware can’t run those files, it’s the fact that Skype itself is just buggy. This is probably just Skype being Skype, to be completely honest wit hyou.

  2. Happens to me too, and some newer Youtube videos I’ve seen where the person recording has a video of their browser, it also happens. It seems that this is common on the new chromium update; I hope it’ll get changed soon, it looks disgusting. For source, I have a laptop and two PCs that have the exact same chrome://newtab. It’s because it’s using you “new tab” settings, I have my new tab set to google.com and it still shows “chrome://newtab” - If I change it to anything else, I’m sure it’d do the same thing. It’s similar to chrome://about.

In short, no worries, you’re definitely overthinking things if I can throw my two cents in. If Malwarebytes and Avast find nothing, honestly, you have nothing to worry about. If you’re really worried, then yeah, wait for others to comment. I might be wrong, but I face most of the same issues and I personally think it’s nothing to worry about.

Sources: Avid Skype user across three PCs, and a chrome-only user across the same three PCs.